Lorraine Gordon, owner of the iconic Village Vanguard jazz club in New York, and one of the few non-musicians to be named an NEA Jazz Master, died June 9, at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan. She was 95 years old.
Her death was caused by complications of a stroke she suffered on Memorial Day as confirmed by Jed Eisenman, the longtime general manager of the club.
In 2006, Gordon co-wrote her memoir with writer Barry Singer, titled “Alive at the Village Vanguard: My Life In and Out of Jazz Time.” In 2013, the National Endowment for the Arts honored her with the Jazz Master Award for Jazz Advocacy. Unfortunately, at that time she was too ill to attend the ceremony.
“I don’t know what I would have done without jazz,” stated Gordon during an interview with Gary Walker of WBGO jazz radio. Her lifetime affair with jazz began in the 1930s as a teenager and it just continued to grow naturally, like an oak tree, until it reached the heavens.
In 1940, she went to Greenwich Village, to 178 Seventh Ave. South, and took her first walk down that long narrow staircase into the Village Vanguard. She was 17 and a member of the Hot Club of Newark, a society of jazz aficionados. That was the beginning of Gordon’s never-ending jazz life.
That same year, she met her soon-to-be husband Alfred Lion, a German immigrant, who was the recent co-founder of the then fledgling Blue Note Records. They married in 1942 while Lion was in the Army, stationed in Texas. In Lion’s absence she worked at the label and continued with him after his discharge. She pitched in wherever she was needed. She typed, answered the phones and did all the bookkeeping. She noted in her memoir, “And though I didn’t know what public relations meant, I did that too.”
Gordon noted, “I was captivated by Thelonious Monk. He was an original person.” She took the relatively unknown pianist on interviews and drove him around. In the summer of 1948, while trying to promote Monk she met Max Gordon by coincidence on Fire Island. “I accosted Max Gordon,” she recalled during an interview on WBGO. “I’m all business. I told him about Thelonious Monk. He was very interested. He said, ‘I just happen to have an opening in September.’”
She was thrilled to have Monk booked into the Vanguard. The pianist appeared for a week, but the crowds never came.
“Max was somewhat baffled by that experience,” Gordon said. While working with Monk, she and Max Gordon made a connection. After her divorce from Lion, the following year she and Max Gordon were married in 1949.
“My life was nothing but music seven days and nights, and then I married Max and the music continued,” she noted in her memoir. “I just kept to what I loved, jazz.”
The Vanguard interior remained the same throughout the decades after Max Gordon opened it in Greenwich Village in 1935, a rather small room with seating for 123 people. Originally the club was the place for variety acts, comedians and a beatnik scene for poetry and folk singers during the 1950s. As television came into national popularity those acts were introduced to larger audiences on the small screen, leaving Max Gordon to concentrate on a total jazz venue.
The Vanguard was ideal for jazz musicians with its exceptional acoustics and cozy space. In 1957, Sonny Rollins performed on one of the first recording sessions at the club that documented two different trios he was working with on the set “A Night at the Village Vanguard.” This session anointed the club as the place to record a live jazz album. Musicians who followed in the more than 100 live recordings include John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Jason Moran and Wynton Marsalis.
Lorraine Gordon was born Lorraine Stein in Newark, N.J., Oct. 15, 1922, and grew up in a middle class family. Her mother was a homemaker and her father a businessman. After marrying Max Gordon, she traded work for motherhood. They had two daughters, Rebecca and Deborah.
Phillip, her older brother who died in 2009, was an artist and devoted jazz fan, playing trumpet. He painted the mural on the Vanguard’s back wall.
As a political activist during the early 1960s, Gordon protested against nuclear testing and the Vietnam War. During an interview with WBGO, she recalled the night Henry Kissinger (the former U.S. Secretary of State) came into the club. While Gordon was working at the Brooklyn Museum, as a merchandising manager, she found time to run a small boutique record label called Jazz Art. The label’s musicians included the trumpeter Jabbo Smith and trombonist Big Chief Russell Moore.
In 1989, when Max Gordon died, there was no question that Lorraine would carry the Vanguard torch. The club closed the evening of Gordon’s death, but opened the next night. “I took reservations on the phone,” she stated in her memoir. “There was a band still playing that Max had booked in advance, fortunately.”
Gordon became known for her straight-forward approach to the club’s business. Her quick wit and dry humor fit the Vanguard’s ambience, swinging with an improvisational edge. She was still attending the club weeks before her death. She was the woman with the short haircut sitting at the first table on the left when one entered the Vanguard.
Her daughter, Deborah Gordon, who has been working with her for some time, will take over the Vanguard.
Gordon said, “I don’t know what I would have done without jazz.” The real question: What would New York jazz enthusiasts and tourists have done without Lorraine Gordon carrying on the legacy of the Village Vanguard?
Funeral arrangements are being directed by Provenzano Lanza Funeral Home in Manhattan. According to Eisenman, a memorial will be held at the Village Vanguard the weekend of June 15. Information will be posted on the Vanguard’s website, villagevanguard.com.